I just shipped off chapter 1, “Quick Start with Groovy”. Last night, I dug through and updated the code samples along with outputs to Spring Boot 1.1.1.RELEASE, which went out late yesterday. It really is awesome having that effort minimized thanks to AsciiDoc! Basically, I edited the code directly, re-ran the bits where I had captured console outputs so I could recapture them, and made other suitable updates.

Now it’s time to dig in deeper on chapter 2, “Quick Start with Java”. The neat thing with Spring Boot is that what would be usually trimmed down to toy apps due to space constraints can really show off some slick stuff.

In this chapter, I am writing an app that will scan multiple GitHub repositories for open issues and print them out on a web page. It shows the name of the repository, a hyperlink to the issue, and the title. I could put more, but I think this gets the point across.

From there, I will ramp up things wicked cool by adding mobile support. I’ll plug in super simple automatic view switching between desktop and mobile views thanks to Spring Mobile. And I will add a mobile view with jQuery Mobile. Given the rise of mobile-based apps, I think this will be VERY appealing to my readers.

And once again, thanks to AsciiDoc, I don’t waste time on typesetting code. Instead, I WRITE the code, and add explanations and details, a lot like writing reference docs. Yum!!!